letterpress

As a typography fan who has never had any exposure to "real" fonts, I’d quite like to take a course to learn a bit about letterpress printing. I was wondering if any typophiles have been to (or even run!) any courses in London or SE England and could give me some recommendations?

Looking around on the web, there are two lists, one on Letterpress Alive! and one on British Letterpress but a great many of those links seem to be out-of-date and many of the institutions or presses don’t seem to be running anything anymore.

Slow Print Letterpress announces "Zen of Business Cards" letterpress cards in black and white.
We've provided templates for convenience, or will accept client provided art in the same Zen spirit.

One popular option is to order these thrifty black and white cards and then get a couple of groovy iconic rubberstamps (like from our dear friend Leavenworth Jackson ) to customize the cards beyond your wildest dreams!

They're printed on the very lovely Strathmore Writing Cover (Soft White 110#)
One catch: we have to fill a press-sheet of 6 to 12 slots before making the film and plates and printing, so putting out the word to your friends and peeps will get you your own cards that much faster!

Hi,
I plan to letterpress-print a Xmas card and have a difficulty deciding on the colour. I thought about using Pantone 877U or Black 7U.

The card will be printed on a 100% cotton stock and printer claims silver (PMS 877) doesn't look silver but greyish due to the paper high absorbability factor. However, I've found an example online that looks quite good...

I haven't seen any sample myself and don't have time to organise one so I have to trust someone... Anyone have an opinion on how silvery the uncoated silver is? Anyone used 877 or Black 7 on 100% cotton paper? Does it look different form normal grey/black? Would you recommend using it?

The exhibition is curated by Graham Bignell of New North Press and graphic designer Richard Ardagh and features prints and publications by progressive practitioners from around the world. Participants include renowned US broadsheet printers Yee Haw Industries and Hatch Show Print as well as British presses Hand & Eye, Typoretum, Mr Smith and Occasional Print Club.

Please join AIGA DC for a screening of the film Proceed and Be Bold!, the inspiring biography self-proclaimed "Humble Negro Printer" Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. At the age of 40, Amos left his job as a computer programmer to become an independent letterpress artist. We will be raffling off posters from Yee Haw Industries for AIGA members before the film.

Registration for Proceed is now open. Admission for this event is $8 for students, $10 for members, and $12 for non-members. Limited seating will be available the day of the screening, and will be $10 for students, $12 for members, and $14 for non-members.

Hello! Can anyone help me with recognizing this typeface?
It's a geometric sans serif, looks lot like a mixture of Erbar, Kabel, Nobel and Futura. I included the scan of the page as an attachment.
The book where I found it is printed in 1931 by Lumax printing press in Utrecht, Netherlands.
The most noticeable feature which makes a difference to other similar geometric sans serifs is the lowercase w which has a strange crossing. Lowercase a looks a lot like Erbar but it's a bit more condensed. Other letters are really round and geometric.

I have a guess that the typeface might be german but i'm not sure.

Any knowledge about the foundry or other sources to look at would be much appreciated.

Nick Sherman designed a new site for our metal type foundry using some web fonts by Font Bureau which reference faces designed by Morris Fuller Benton once cast on our ATF Barth casters. If you are interested in metal type or letterpress I hope you will have a look!

The original design was hand-set in foundry Optima and a funky Monotype Deepdene back in the late 1980s, and printed in a small run on the Universal I Vandercook.

I recently discovered the forms still standing in the galley. This new edition is printed on the 10x15 Heidelberg Windmill from photopolymer, made from new repro-proofs taken from the original type, and scanned at 2400 dpi. Minor artifacts from the proofing and scanning were cleaned up in Photoshop prior to making film and plates. However, the original design has not been altered, although it was awfully tempting to tweak the spacing once more before committing it to the press! ;-)

The photo was taken in a strong afternoon sunlight. Apologies for the excessive contrast. Need to find my copy-stand!

Printed with metallic silver ink on Hahnemuhle German Etching Black 600gsm.
The Projekt logo was 'double-bumped', that is, I stripped the rest of the plate off the base and ran the cards through the press a second time. The Heidelberg's spot perfect registration allows for this kind of extra hit. Few other letterpress machines can match the Windmill!

I generally discourage trying to print on black, since most inks really can't cover and there's no brilliance to the resulting impression.

Hot off the press, cards for my consulting persona on Hahnemuhle's Copperplate+Bugra custom duplexed to make a 430gsm sheet.

This is the Bugra "Burgundy" color, and bright-white Copperplate etching paper.
The stock was dampened using a 16th century technique before printing from photopolymer plates on the 10x15 Heidelberg Windmill letterpress

The reverse side has been printed with two varnishes, tinted with bronze powder and silver... which only show up when the light is just right. The silvered varnish is used on the front, along with two 'normal' inks.

Impression depth is not quite as dramatic as it seems, but I had to use a hard side-light to be able to see the subtle varnish on the front of the card.

Fonts are Gill Sans with bold and italic. The Semiotx logo is from my own library, A*I Marlowe, a revival based on the Oxford Fell types, the forms here were altered by eye to make the lower-case weights match the caps (or was it visa versa?)

A printing method where type, in the form of metal or wood letters, or more widely since the end of the 1990s, photopolymer plates, and optionally graphics are placed on a press or another stable platform to accept weight and pressure, locked tight in place, with a quoin (specialized wedges), inked, typically with a rubber roller, covered with paper, or other impressionable and portable material, subjected to pressure and release within a press, after which the ink remains on the paper, and the process may be repeated.